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Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Necromentia

I started thinking up my review for this movie before it even hit the halfway mark, and even then I knew it was going to be a negative review- which is quite the understatement. Amazingly, I have a bit of a history with this flick. I saw an advertisement or something for it somewhere when it just came out back in 2009, right around the time I was discovering the horror genre on my own. The poster promised it was like 'Hellraiser meets Saw', which at the time were on the forefront of all the horror movies I was discovering, and those were sitting atop the heap. I loved em. Anyways, normally bait like that wouldn't outright hook me, but I was young and dumb and very much interested.
For whatever reason, I didn't rent it then, and kinda forgot about it. But a year later or so I remembered the name, looked up the trailer and was really interested in seeing it all over again. But I couldn't find it anywhere anymore, so eventually my enthusiasm faded and I moved on. But this cycle would repeat itself every other year or so. Necromentia had become something of a thing in my life. It was something I was just going to have to knuckle the hell down and watch, because my expectations and hype for this movie were unjustifiably high. For no other reason than I'd really wanted to see it for a very very long time.

Now, I finally have. Unfortunately. I obtained a copy of it (cough) and started in on it right away. Oh man, lemme just say... this movie is a mess. It starts with this guy showing up in hell, which here just looks like some creepy maintenance tunnel under a big building or something. Immediately, we flash back to see who this guy is. Unfortunately, the flashback gives us no useful information except that he's a necrophiliac with a dead wife. Then one night while he's mopping the floor in a barber shop, two guys come in and promise him a way to bring his wife back from the dead. So, finally, I thought. The movie is taking shape, here's a bit of direction. Excellent.

Nope. Some crap happens to creepy necrophiliac janitor guy, and then we flash back 11 months ago to explore the backstory of one of the guys who promised necro-janitor he could bring his wife back. This movie has a horrible tendency of backpedaling every time it gets a bit of focus. It's terrible. It's like weird kinda creepy scenes connected by flashbacks and flash-forwards, I think there might have even been a... flash-sideways at one point? Anyways, it finally seems the movie has found it's main character. A rather hopeless sod named Travis, who has a disabled younger brother named Thomas.
Travis wants a better life for Thomas, who frequently sees an bloodied and obese man-pig appear to him in happy song and dance, telling him he should commit suicide.

Yeah, so that's a thing. I don't know. Anyways, Travis apparently tortures people for a living? Like a really messed up dominatrix kind of thing? But with actual torture. Like, Eli Roth torture shit. It's odd as hell, I mean, how does one land a job doing this? We have no other info about Travis- nothing useful anyways. We're told in passing he's addicted to heroin, and that his parents are dead. At this point, I'm wondering how this is really even a horror movie. It's just aggressively uncomfortable, not scary in the slightest. The plot doesn't ever take shape at any one point. Pieces click together here and there, like twists, but without any sort of... presentation? Every direction, every scene, everything in this movie just sorta happens.

There's also an ungodly amount of pointless dialog. I don't mean meandering stuff, I mean, the dialog just takes up space in scenes that go on and on and on. You would stop caring about the characters if the movie had ever given you a reason to start in the first place. Travis is vaguely sympathetic, but... not really? The quality of acting is all over the place and the story is just... bad. The more I think about this movie, the less I like it. Anyways, if you take a massive step back you can kinda see that the central theme is about the perils of... revenge? Or something? It revolves around people getting these "ouija board" (according to iMDB at least, that's literally never mentioned in the movie) maps cut into their flesh so they can go to hell for whatever reason.

Which means all the exposition Travis spouted towards the beginning was complete nonsense. There was some crap about hell gates, portals and such- nope. None of that. Just... stuff. I guess. The movie is painfully vague. Is it about necromancy? I dunno. Nobody is ever resurrected. One character swears to avenge some shit over here, so he enlists this dude over here who swears to bring some other dude back to life who's busy swearing to do some other crap. Oh my god. Why? Why? I don't know. I don't care. The movie dragged on and on. It's only an hour and 16 minutes but it felt like three hours. It wasn't scary, it wasn't creepy, it was just boring and uncomfortable. There's no normal frame of reference, even the real world looks like a miserable hellish shithole. The hell tunnel looks like the cleanest most regular place around.

The only compliments I can pay this movie is that their practical effects are uniformly great, the props look neat, the production design is actually really unique and solid, and the creature in the movie looks super cool. Why he's in the movie, what he does- I couldn't tell you. He drags people around the tunnel and kills em? I guess? If the movie was focused on it more it would've been better. The visuals deserve a better movie around them. It's occasional rapid-fire editing could be put to use in a death metal music video. Maybe Slipknot can make something out of this mess. I don't know. There's neat visuals, but they have nothing behind them. No point, no plot, no purpose. It's just boring and frustrating. Otherwise, the score is lame, the sound effects are amateurish at best and there's a massive and blinding lack of focus and direction. The story is stretched so thin that you lose track of it. It's simple as hell and really uncomplicated, or at least it would be if it stopped flashing back or switching perspectives.

Supposedly the four main characters lives are intertwined, but we don't care. With the possible exception of Travis, they're all assholes in one way or another. And now this review ends, just like the movie does, without rhyme or reason. It just sorta ends when it's done.